Your payoff plan

The plan on Debt Payoff is where you decide what your debt payoff really looks like: which debt goes first, and the Extra each month you can honestly send on top of the minimums. Counting the cost before you commit is part of stewardship, and this is a room built for exactly that.

Try it before you keep it. Pick another strategy, reorder your debts or change the extra, and the date, the chart and the order on the page move as you go. Nothing is kept until you press Save plan — until then the Monthly plan says Not saved, and leaving the page keeps the plan you last saved. Save plan keeps the strategy, the order and the extra together, and the message that follows has an Undo that puts back the plan you had. Your snowball and the payments already on your calendar ride along with every version.

The Snowball amount is the minimums freed by debts you’ve already paid off. It starts rolling the month after each payoff — in the payoff month itself that money was still finishing the debt — and it is counted in every projection automatically. Payments you’ve scheduled in future budgets are modeled too, in the months they actually land. The debts behind it are kept in the Trophy Case; the Paid off line under the Debts table takes you there.

The four strategies

• Snowball — smallest balance first. Costs a little more; clears a whole debt soonest, which is the one that keeps people going.
• Avalanche — highest rate first. Usually the cheapest in total interest.
• Cash-Flow — whatever frees up the most monthly room soonest. Often the most expensive overall, and the right answer when the month is too tight to breathe.
• Custom — your order, for when you have a reason the math does not know about. It starts as Snowball’s order; Edit payoff order moves debts up and down (on a phone, pick Custom and it sits right under the switch), and Use this order puts it on the page for you to save.

There is rarely one right answer. Avalanche wins on arithmetic; the best plan is the one you will still be doing in a year. Steady beats clever.

Where your plan shows up

Once saved, the plan is the one the app runs everywhere it names a debt-free month: the top of Debt Payoff, the Debt-free journey card on Home, the Debt payoff figure on Accounts and the Budget’s Debt section all show the same month. The Debt section also measures what each month actually sends against your minimums plus your extra, and recommends which debt the next extra dollar goes to, in the order your plan pays them off.

One thing it does not do, which we would rather say plainly: neither your cash flow nor your budget’s debt line spends the extra for you — each shows the payments you have actually scheduled.

See it month by month, under the chart, opens the payment schedule: every payment to every debt, month by month, until the last one is gone. Export schedule (in the page’s ⋯ on a phone) saves it as a CSV if you want it outside the app. See What we hold about you for what else can and cannot leave.